Graham Hayman
The seeds of an awareness of new music were planted by Eastern Cape musicians last month when they presented works from six contemporary South African and foreign composers, first in Grahamstown then in Port Elizabeth.
The ensemble featured University of Port Elizabeth (UPE) teacher Andrea Erasmus (viola), and Annamarie Conradie (cello) from the East Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, with Grahamstown players Rick van Heerden on sax and Ian Smith on flute. Rhodes lecturer in composition Michael Blake said he hoped for more collaborations in presenting new music, and not only in the Eastern Cape.
New music or “art music” is diverse, and is the serious (rather than popular) written music of the 20th century. “The Port Elizabeth audience for classical music is traditionally conservative,” said UPE’s head of music Dr Erik Albertyn, “and this music is a rather new concept for them. But it’s a question of exposure, a necessary experience. We can’t continue presenting only the music of more than 100 years ago. We must expand the market.”
The Port Elizabeth audience, accustomed to regular menus of classical fare by UPE’s School of Music, commented favourably after the concert. “I have never heard anything like it,” said one. “Perhaps we underestimate people’s capacity to appreciate new things,” said Blake. “I was pleasantly surprised at how much they enjoyed it – we must develop this new audience.”
The collaboration between Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown began with new arrivals. Professor Christine Lucia, the new head at Rhodes University’s music department, brought Michael Blake to teach composition. “Collaboration between Rhodes music department and UPE’s School of Music had been on our agenda for some time, and when Dr Eric Albertyn became head of the UPE School of Music, he almost immediately visited Grahamstown to explore links with us,” she said.
Having had exciting encounters with diverse musical cultures in Europe, Blake and Lucia want to spread this excitement. “The so- called cross-over between black and white South African music has happened in popular music. It’s time this happened for serious music, and we hope to stimulate it. We think new music includes the numerous black South African choral composers who have been largely ignored by the white community.”
As a musical entrepreneur Blake previously staged concerts for his “London New Music”, while Oxford-educated Lucia previously taught in Durban where she reviewed new music, then befriended and performed music by South Africa’s best-known composer, Kevin Volans. In Grahamstown their organisation, newmusic@rhodes, is dedicated to contemporary music, and has been staging year-long programs of concerts, lectures and workshops since 1997.
The performers were uniformly enthusiastic about the music. “There’s no easy tune, it’s challenging. You can’t just pump it out, and its great to play,” said falutist Smith, also head of music at Kingswood College.
New music generally challenges performers to interpret music more actively than “classical” music, where individual interpretation is more limited and scores are more prescriptive.
Technology plays a part in the music of course, and will also facilitate networking. Plans are afoot in Grahamstown for a “newmusic” web site. In the recent performances, computers were compositional tools, and for the John Cage piece Five, a computer stopwatch cued players when to play their particular notes. “Arranging music is also much easier on computer,” said Blake.
Albertyn believes the key lies in performance. “We will eventually have a music style based in and of South Africa. That doesn’t mean we have to discard the Western tradition, but because of isolation we bred a pseudo-elitism which didn’t have any local base. We kept on importing overseas musicians to practise Eastern music styles.”